A-Z Linux Guide

In the march of the penguins to World Domination, I have seen Linux become more and more commonplace. Back with my first attempt to install Slackware Linux from 3.5” floppies onto my Packard Bell 386 Legend with its 40MB hard drive, 1x CD-ROM and S3 video knockoff, I never did get X to run with any resolution higher than 300×400. It was horrible – the desktop was so large that my screen couldn’t contain all of it. The window manager, as I recall that day in 1994, was VWM. As I wasn’t so interested in a GUI environment, and really just wanted an UNIX-like PC so I could practice things like shell scripting, it was “Ok” for me. It was not “good enough” for my girlfriend though. She had her Mac Performa and what I used didn’t matter.

The book I used to get my first Linux CD with Slackware was published by Que. And there was nothing in it about programming X. There wasn’t really much about even configuring X. The state of Linux was so bad, that there weren’t even drivers to read from my CD-ROM, which was connected through my sound card. That’s why I had to copy the files from the CD-ROM onto individual floppies – 30 of them. I was hooked – I was not going to let some piece of computer hardware defeat me. I was going to make this thing usable by even the most illiterate of users. [Source: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/78487/]